Gramps:Copyrights

The contents of this wiki site is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2, (with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). If you do not agree with the full terms of the license, you are not allowed to distribute either original or modified form of this contents. In particular, you may not contribute to this site because contribution to this site is a re-distribution to a large number of readers in the world.

The Manual section of this wiki (pages starting with Manual, or localized version of such a page) is under the GFDL and under GPLv2+. If you do not agree with this dual license, you may not contribute to this part of the wik. This dual license is needed to allow simple distribution of the manual together with the Gramps program.

The English text of the GFDL is the only legally binding document; what follows is our interpretation of the GFDL: the rights and obligations of users and contributors.

Contributors' rights and obligations

If you contribute material to Gramps, you thereby license it to the public under the GFDL (with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts).

In order to contribute, you must be in a position to grant this license, which means that either

you hold the copyright to the material, for instance because you produced it yourself, or

you acquired the material from a source that allows the licensing under GFDL, for instance because the material is in the public domain or is itself published under GFDL.

In the first case, you retain copyright to your materials. You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you can never retract the GFDL license for the versions you placed here: that material will remain under GFDL forever.

In the second case, if you incorporate external GFDL materials, as a requirement of the GFDL, you need to acknowledge the authorship and provide a link back to the network location of the original copy. Eg, part of this text is copied from Wikipedia:Copyrigths. Adding this link makes this article conform to the GFDL license. It is however better practice to add a Links section to the bottom of your article to add this.

The contents is copyright by their respective authors, see History tab of every page for details.

Using copyrighted work from others

All works are copyrighted unless they either fall into the public domain or their copyright is explicitly disclaimed. If you use part of a copyrighted work under "fair use", or if you obtain special permission to use a copyrighted work from the copyright holder under the terms of our license, you must make a note of that fact (along with names and dates). It is our goal to be able to freely redistribute as much of Gramps's material as possible, so original images and sound files licensed under the GFDL or in the public domain are greatly preferred to copyrighted media files used under fair use.

Never use materials that infringe the copyrights of others. This could create legal liabilities and seriously hurt the project. If in doubt, write it yourself.

Note that copyright law governs the creative expression of ideas, not the ideas or information themselves. Therefore, it is legal to read an encyclopedia article or other work, reformulate the concepts in your own words, and submit it to Gramps. However, it would still be unethical (but not illegal) to do so without citing the original as a reference.

Linking to copyrighted works

Since most recently-created works are copyrighted, almost any Gramps article which cites its sources will link to copyrighted material. It is not necessary to obtain the permission of a copyright holder before linking to copyrighted material -- just as an author of a book does not need permission to cite someone else's work in their bibliography. Likewise, Gramps is not restricted to linking only to GFDL-free or open-source content.

If you know that an external Web site is carrying a work in violation of the creator's copyright, do not link to that copy of the work. Knowingly and intentionally directing others to a site that violates copyright has been considered a form of contributory infringement in the United States (Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry).

Image guidelines

Images and photographs, like written works, are subject to copyright. Someone holds the copyright unless they have been explicitly placed in the public domain. Images on the internet need to be licensed directly from the copyright holder or someone able to license on their behalf. In some cases, fair use guidelines may allow a photograph to be used.

Image description pages must be tagged with a special tag to indicate the legal status of the images, as described at GRAMPS:Image copyright tags. Untagged or incorrectly-tagged images will be deleted.

Introducing invariant sections or cover texts in Gramps

Under Gramps's copyright conditions, and with the current facilities of the MediaWiki software, it is only possible to include in Gramps external GFDL materials that contain invariant sections or cover texts, if all of the following apply,

You are the copyright holder of these external GFDL materials (or: you have the explicit, i.e. written, permission of the copyright holder to do what follows);

The length and nature of these invariant sections and cover texts does not exceed what can be placed in an edit summary;

You are satisfied that these invariant sections and cover texts are not listed elsewhere than in the "page history" of the page where these external materials are placed;

You are satisfied that further copies of Gramps content are distributed under the standard GFDL application of "with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts" (in other words, for the copies derived from Gramps, you agree that these parts of the text contributed by you will no longer be considered as "invariant sections" or "cover texts" in the GFDL sense);

The original invariant sections and/or cover texts are contained in the edit summary of the edit with which you introduce the thus GFDLed materials in wikipedia (so, that if "permanent deletion" would be applied to that edit, both the thus GFDLed material and its invariant sections and cover texts are jointly deleted).

Seen the stringent conditions above, it is very desirable to replace GFDL texts with invariant sections (or with cover texts) by original content without invariant sections (or cover texts) whenever possible.

Reusers' rights and obligations

If you want to use Gramps materials in your own books/articles/web sites
or other publications, you can do so, but you have to follow the GFDL. If you are simply duplicating the Gramps article, you must follow section two of the GFDL on verbatim copying.

If you create a derivative version by changing or adding content, this entails the following:

your materials in turn have to be licensed under GFDL,

you must acknowledge the authorship of the article (section 4B), and

you must provide access to the "transparent copy" of the material (section 4J). (The "transparent copy" of a Gramps article is any of a number of formats available from us, including the wiki text, the html web pages, xml feed, etc.)

You may be able to partially fulfill the latter two obligations by providing a conspicuous direct link back to the Wikipedia article hosted on this website. You also need to provide access to a transparent copy of the new text. However, please note that the Gramps project makes no guarantee to retain authorship information and a transparent copy of articles. Therefore, you are encouraged to provide this authorship information and a transparent copy with your derived works.

Example notice

An example notice on a website using the Gramps article Features where the content is available under GFDL, would be a link to the page with the Gramps article, and the text 'Material lended from'.

A general example notice, for an article that uses the Gramps article Features might read as follows:

("Gramps program features" and the URLs enclosed in the above must of course be substituted as necessary.)

Alternatively you can distribute your copy of "Gramps program features" and list at least five (or all if fewer than five) principal authors on the title page (or top of the document), as explained in the text of the GFDL license. All (re-)distributed documents need to include a copy of the GFDL license text.

Fair use materials and special requirements

All original Gramps text is distributed under the GFDL. Gramps articles may also include quotations, images, or other media under the U.S. Copyright law doctrine. It is preferred that these be obtained under the most "free content" license practical (such as the GFDL or public domain). In cases where no such images/sounds are currently available, then fair use may be used in certain circumstances.

In Gramps, such "fair use" material should be identified as from an external source (on the image description page, or history page, as appropriate). This also leads to possible restrictions on the use, outside of Gramps, of such "fair use" content retrieved from Gramps: this "fair use" content does not fall under the GFDL license as such, but under the "fair use" (or similar/different) regulations in the country where the media are retrieved. As an example, this could be an image of a commercial genealogical application as retrieved from a company website.

Gramps may use some text under licenses that are compatible with the GFDL but may require additional terms that we do not require for original Gramps text (such as including Invariant Sections, Front-Cover Texts, or Back-Cover Texts). When wanting to contribute such texts that include Invariant Sections or Cover Texts to Gramps, see Introducing invariant sections or cover texts in Gramps above.

If you are the owner of Gramps-hosted content being used without your permission

If you are the owner of content that is being used on Gramps without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from Gramps. Contact us by mailing the developers mailing list. Note that it can take up to a week for the page to be deleted (you may also blank the page and replace it with the words "The previous content of this page appears to infringe on the copyright of the text from the source(s): yoururl/source. Mail has been send to the developers to resolve this issue". Note that the text will still be in the page history). Either way, we will, of course, need some evidence to support your claim of ownership.